Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 5

have evidently trained themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.
The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by the barbarous term of "scientists" seem to think that it matters nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry "memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we have tens of thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that Tom Jones is a work of art, and the Decline and Fall is a work of art.
It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley conceived his Prometheus, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of invention. Since the School for Scandal (1777) no English drama has been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of success as fell to Byron and Shelley with Manfred and the Cenci. With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its learning, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe. It is as if its scientific spirit checked the supreme imagination: as if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic passion.
One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the preponderance of the "subjective" over the "objective." The interest in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales before the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have completely dominated our age, and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron, Campbell, and Southey. The Two Voices, In Memoriam, _The Ring and the Book, Silas Marner, Vanity Fair, Bleak House_, dissect brain and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history. The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the outside world. Hence the enormous multiplication of the psychologic novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed with wonder and perplexity. The curious part of this is the striking abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense extension of historical study and archaeological revival. We know far more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers; and we are always seeking to realise to ourselves the habits, ideas, aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study with sympathetic zeal and in the minutest detail. Yet the historical romance appears only at intervals. Harold and Esmond are both more than forty years old, Romola more than thirty years old. They are none of them quite unqualified successes; and no later historical romance has approached these three in power and interest. Why is it, that, in an age pre-eminently historical, in an age so redundant of novels, the historical novel is out of fashion? Partly, no doubt, our romancers shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North; partly, the analytic genius of